Sunday, November 1, 2009

Various people I know across the pro/anti-transhumanism spectrum have been looking for a while for good but concise introductory material to give to people who don't know about the Singularity. Ray Kurzweil's The Singularity is Near is probably now the standard introductory text, but not all people want to read a book that is in what Kurzweil might call an uncompressed format (which is to say, rather long and repetitive) on a subject that they don't know anything about in the first place.

Well, thank goodness for the variation of media formats. If you're looking for something short and clear, I found essentially a six-page version of Kurzweil's book that he did as an article for The Futurist, the magazine of the World Future Society. It's on pages 2-3 and 5-9 of the PDF here.

Wikipedia was the first place I looked, but that article is too scattered and badly written to be useful to lay readers looking for an introduction to the subject.

Frankly, it’s bizarre that you would accuse me of trying to shield readers from anything “disadvantageous to [my] arguments” after I directed them to the work of the most prominent and vocal advocate of transhumanism.